Ask HN: What are some things you learnt from HN?

I've been dwelling here for many years and every now and then I get this feeling that I've been fed "hypes" and ephemeral chunks of information that later turned out to be pretty useless. And the comments, despite enlightening (esp. in Lisp threads!), have not really taught me anything I didn't already know.

Is this how social media/news websites are supposed to be? I feel like I'm wasting my time contributing to them in general (and HN in particular).